She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [165]
“Wanting means you’re not having one,” he said.
“It means, I’m wanting this. I’m wanting myself to put on the brakes, but I’m not.”
At times DeGuerin shuffled through his legal pads, looking for his next quote. When he settled on one from Tracey’s Timberlawn chart he read from Milholland’s notes: “‘Patient’s dream is to have an affair with peer.’ You had suicidal and romantic patterns. You had a history of convincing heterosexual women to try lesbianism. Haven’t you?”
“No sir,” Tracey said. “I’ve never recruited anybody.”
“Wasn’t Zan Ray a heterosexual woman before your relationship?”
Wetzel had warned Tracey that DeGuerin would do all he could to anger her. She was determined not to be rattled. “These women both came voluntarily to the relationships,” Tracey answered calmly. “They weren’t coerced.”
At times the defense attorney tried to draw a picture of Kristina as having been close to Tracey, perhaps even closer than Celeste. Kristina, he pointed out, went to her house the night she’d threatened suicide, to take the guns away from her. She’d had a key to Tracey’s house. Somehow, it never came off. Perhaps because he couldn’t show they spent time together other than at Celeste’s behest. When it came to the relationship counseling the two women attended with Barbara Grant, something Wetzel had put in earlier when Grant was on the stand, he said, “Wasn’t that the reason you went to see Barbara Grant, because you were recruiting Celeste?”
“No,” Tracey said. “I didn’t bring her to recruit her. That’s not the reason.”
“You were hoping Barbara Grant would counsel Celeste to be more comfortable.”
This time Tracey agreed. She had wanted Celeste to become more comfortable with their sex life. “Yes, sir,” she said.
Pointing out that nowhere in Tracey’s journals did she ever recount a sexual experience with Celeste, he asked, “Is there a single journal entry in which you wrote Celeste stayed all night?”
“That wasn’t an issue for me.”
“Is there a single journal entry in which you say it finally happened, we finally had sex?”
“No,” Tracey admitted.
“It was all in your mind, wasn’t it?” he charged.
“No,” she replied.
Through it all, DeGuerin hammered at his themes. One was that Tracey had misrepresented the house and the way she’d walked through it on the night of the shooting. He contended that she couldn’t have parked where she said she did without jumping down a wall. All of this, he suggested, meant she was lying when she said that Celeste had walked through the house with her, laying out the route.
Behind the prosecutors’ table, Cobb and Wetzel objected when they could and watched as DeGuerin attacked the woman who formed the centerpiece of their case. Even at pretrial, Wetzel and the defense attorney had clashed. Yet she had to admit he was using everything he possibly could against the witnesses she called to the stand. He rarely left an opportunity unexplored.
Finally, the defense attorney pulled an old prosecutor’s trick out of his portfolio; he got Tracey’s shotgun. Calling her out of the witness box, he put it in her hands. It was empty, but still threatening. “Show us how you shot Steven Beard,” he ordered.
Tracey looked toward the prosecutors and the judge, but neither interceded. Instead, looking tired and deflated, she aimed at a wall. “I aimed at him and squeezed the trigger,” she said, poising the shotgun on her shoulder, like a hunter in the field. Quickly, she put the gun down.
“Show us again,” DeGuerin ordered. Again she complied, and again she immediately lowered the gun and put it on a counter. As she walked back to the stand, instead of dangerous, Tracey Tarlton appeared beaten and regretful. She’d shot